The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (47 page)

‘Show Mr—?’

‘Bartram.’

‘Show Mr Bartram out,’ she said. ‘I think he’s got what he came for. Another satisfied gentleman.’

She held her hand out.

‘Think carefully about what you do next,’ she said, as he shook it.

He walked out into the street between the sphinxes. Did the other impassive Tite Street houses hide secrets? he wondered, as he walked past lit drawing-room windows. In one a woman was playing a piano with a girl turning the pages beside her. The sash was down and the notes were quite clear on the night air.

As he turned into Flood Street he was hit by a wave of emotion. He thought of his baby son, whom he had never had a chance to see, of Mary, whom he was leaving. Yet in all the death and loss of the last years, the fate of Kitty Easton struck him as being inordinately sad. He had discovered her fate so easily. If Lydia Easton or Jane Rivers had not been so frightened, if either had confided in one of the Easton brothers, they might well have made the connection that he had. Even after Digby’s death, the two women had kept silent through a pact of loyalty, fear and shame. For want of a single conversation, Kitty Easton had been lost to them for ever.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Finally he walked into the shop. The floorboards were bleached with age and neat piles of goods were stacked up on a scarred wooden counter. It was an old shop, smelling of tar and soap, but everything was spotless, from the glass jars to the small wall of drawers. There were two customers: an elderly lady in a battered black straw hat and a small boy. The shopkeeper, a woman, was up a small set of steps, reaching for a caddy off a shelf, the white ties of an apron hanging down against her striped dress.

A noise from the corner made him look round. A fat baby—he could never tell how old they were—was sitting, gurgling happily while it bit on a rattle and then examined it carefully. A few toys lay on a blanket around it. The baby’s eyes were following its mother as she descended backwards, clutching the jar. She stepped off the last rung, put down the jar and started unscrewing the lid. As she did so, she lifted her head to acknowledge Laurence.

He knew in that moment that it was her. Her face was wider than her mother’s or aunt’s, her bobbed hair thicker and almost tawny, her colouring much more like the pictures he had seen of her father, and she had wonderfully bright-blue eyes. She took up a scoop and measured tea on to the scales. Finally his eyes went to her hands.

‘Is that enough, Mrs Jones?’ she said and in those few words he could hear her London accent. When the old woman nodded assent, she checked the scale and tipped a little more in. She smiled conspiratorially at the boy.

‘And four ounces of broken biscuits, was it?’ She went to one of the sacks behind her, holding a brown paper bag.

The customer turned her head and regarded Laurence with curiosity.

‘Good morning,’ he said. She said something back that he didn’t catch. Behind the counter the young woman was writing the prices down on a bit of paper, biting her lip with concentration.

‘You come back when you can. When Fred’s better.’ Her head was still down as she wrote. ‘Wait a minute, Sidney,’ she said to the small boy when she’d finished, ‘let’s see what I got here.’

She reached under the counter, brought out a tin, opened it and tipped it towards him. The boy hesitated for a few seconds, then his hand darted forward as if she might snatch the tin away at any moment. He pulled out a sweet, looked enquiringly at the older woman beside him and then put it in his mouth. When the older woman nudged him, he muttered something like ‘Thank you, missus.’ She picked up her tea, a block of green soap and two other small packages, and put them in a string bag.

‘Isn’t your little ’un doing well?’ the customer said, turning around, yet glancing at Laurence again.

The young woman came out from behind the counter and swept the baby up into her arms, its two plump feet kicking excitedly. She kissed its head.

‘You are a good little girl, aren’t you, Esme?’ She swung her on to a hip. ‘Mostly.’ She looked up and laughed. ‘She’s getting teeth, though! So we’ve had some bad nights, I can tell you.’ But her voice contradicted any complaint. ‘Mind you, you’ve had plenty so you’d know.’

The older woman’s face crinkled and she ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘It’s the grandchildren makes me lose sleep,’ she said. ‘And now there’s another on its way. Our Anne. That’s three she’s had since Fred got back. She’ll have her work cut out. Her Ivy’s a holy terror.’

Pushing the boy before her, she dipped her head to Laurence as she went out, the bell jangling.

The shop seemed suddenly silent. Dust shimmered in the sunbeams. The young woman jiggled the baby and it chortled at her. Then she met his eyes, her expression open and curious.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

His gaze took in her face, her small kingdom and her fat baby.

‘It’s your shop?’

‘Well, me and my husband’s. It was his pa’s but he passed away while Jim was at the war. So now we’ve taken it on. We’ve got plans to expand. Maybe.’ She laughed self-consciously. ‘Maybe some haberdashery, now we’ve got our little girl. We went to the exhibition twice; once we saw the King and Queen.’ Her eyes shone. ‘Close as me and you. Esme’s too young to remember but we can tell her she was there.’ She wiped the baby’s face on a corner of her apron. ‘Did you go?’

‘Yes. Yes. Marvellous. I might go again. See one of the concerts.’

‘There’s lots of building going on up there.’

She looked eagerly at him as if testing whether he’d noticed and he nodded in agreement. He thought of the boundless expanse of flattened earth cleared of trees and bushes, and its geometrical markings of pegs and rope, the neat stacks of building materials, the digging men, and the narrow avenues cutting across the space, criss-crossing each other, just waiting for houses.

‘Well, we thought we might open up near Wembley Park. They’ve got shops going there. People with new houses’ll need all sorts, Jim says. And with Esme, it’d be better out there in the country. Better air than smoky old London. We could have a little garden. Jim’d like to grow vegetables ... have chickens.’ She stopped. ‘But what am I running on about when I should be serving you? Jim always says I could talk the hind legs off a donkey.’ She put out a hand to stop the baby pulling her hair. ‘Let me put Baby down and I’ll be with you.’

He watched her set the child down tenderly; it protested but only for a few seconds. He felt in his pocket for the photographs of Digby and Lydia, the picture of Easton.

As she stood up, she smoothed down her hair in an action he recognised from Frances. Yet he was still glad he had not told Mrs Smith, the widow at Camberwell who had acted as her mother since she was five, the truth. He had, as Mrs Le Fèvre counselled him, gone carefully.

‘Your husband sounds a good businessman.’

‘Oh he is,’ she said, suddenly looking even younger than her eighteen years. ‘He’s a good man. He looks after us.’ She shot a glance at the baby and suddenly looked wistful. ‘I didn’t have much when I was little but we’re going to give Esme everything.’ He paused, looking at her until he began to see slight anxiety come into her eyes.

‘Could I have two ounces of rice?’ he said, quickly. ‘And some baking powder and ... some custard?’

She seemed amused but turned to fetch them. Cutting string from a ball on the counter top, she wrapped everything up for him. He handed her the money. She rang up the cash register and handed him back sixpence.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep it for Esme.’

She looked embarrassed. ‘No, you can’t—’

‘I want to. Really.’

Comprehension dawned in her face. ‘You’ve a kiddie yourself?’ He nodded. ‘Yes. A little boy.’

‘They’re everything, aren’t they?’ she said happily, as she passed him the brown paper packages.

For a second their hands touched. He took one last long look at her familiar, yet unknown face, tipped his hat to her, opened the door and walked out on to the street.

Two ringed pigeons were squabbling over a piece of stale bread in the gutter. Across the road a group of girls had chalked out squares on the pavement and were jumping in and out of them, following the rules of some ancient game. A stout woman in an apron watched them from her doorstep, arms akimbo. There was a breeze getting up. He wasn’t sure whether it was going to rain again, but he thought he’d walk the whole way home anyway. Soon cool, rainy English streets and tidy front gardens would be just a memory.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank my agent, Georgina Capel at Capel & Land, for ten years of support, advice and friendship; Lennie Goodings and Victoria Pepe for clear and sensitive editorial direction; and the larger team at Virago and Little, Brown for their enthusiasm and professionalism. Once again I am indebted to Celia Levett, the ideally patient and rigorous copy-editor for a rather slapdash typist.

Two inspired and inspiring gardeners, Mary Keen and Julian Bannerman, answered questions on mazes and Wiltshire soil; the Bannermans’ marvellously dramatic house, Hanham Court, near Bristol, was partly responsible for my creation of Easton Hall. John Hopkins advised upon hydroelectricity and drew my attention to early installations in private houses, particularly Cragside, Northumberland, and Knightshayes Court in Devon.

Catherine Hopkins assisted me with questions of law. Louise Foxcroft, medical historian, provided details of diseases and treatments of the 1920s. Descriptions of the River Kennet—a very different river in the 1920s from the narrow watercourse it is today—were taken from a wonderfully elegiac piece in
Blackwood’s Magazine,
‘Passing of a River’ by Dr Godfrey Maurice, a Marlborough doctor from 1912 to 1921.

Twenty-seven million people visited the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and all bar two of the fifty-eight countries of the Empire exhibited. Only the Palace of Industry still survives, as a run-down warehouse. Of many sources
Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition 1924
(edited by Oliver Green) was the most evocative.

My interest in the strange prehistoric landscape of Wiltshire dates from a field trip over three startlingly cold and wet days in my first term as a mature student at Cambridge. I am grateful to Lucy Cavendish College for that and so many other opportunities.

About the Author

E
LIZABETH
S
PELLER
lived in Berlin, Rome and Paris before reading Classics at Cambridge. She has written for publications as varied as the
Independent, Financial Times, Big Issue
and
Vogue
and has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Birmingham and Bristol. She currently holds a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Warwick University and divides her life between Gloucestershire and Greece. Her first novel was
The Return of Captain John Emmett.